Question

I am using a regex to find:

test:?

Followed by any character until it hits the next:

test:?

Now when I run this regex I made:

((?:test:\?)(.*)(?!test:\?))

On this text:

test:?foo2=bar2&baz2=foo2test:?foo=bar&baz=footest:?foo2=bar2&baz2=foo2

I expected to get:

test:?foo2=bar2&baz2=foo2

test:?foo=bar&baz=foo

test:?foo2=bar2&baz2=foo2

But instead it matches everything. Does anyone with more regex experience know where I have gone wrong? I’ve used regexes for pattern matching before but this is my first experience of lookarounds/aheads.

Thanks in advance for any help/tips/pointers 🙂

Answer 1

I guess you could explore a greedy version.
(expanded)

(test:\? (?: (?!test:\?)[\s\S])* )